I made a video about hypotheses for the evolution of breasts in women. Sort of a video. It’s not very visual, and is just me talking, because I didn’t want anyone distracted by sexy pictures — that wasn’t the point. I even left my sexy face out of it.
Since it’s just me droning on, I include my script below, so you can skip the video altogether and just read what I said.
Really, it’s harder than you think. Individual science papers typically build on a larger body of knowledge and don’t stand alone; it is assumed that the reader has significant amounts of training in the subject at hand so that the authors don’t bother to fill in all the background. When writing a summary of the article for a general audience, one has to provide a lot of context, without simply reiterating the contents of, for instance, a molecular biology textbook and a year’s worth of upper level biology education. And if someone writing a summary of an article lacks that knowledge altogether, the misinterpretations can be disastrously wrong.
Take this article in TechTimes, Massive Genetic Study Reveals 90 Percent Of Earth’s Animals Appeared At The Same Time. The title alone is creationist clickbait, and the author of the story clearly didn’t understand the article at all. She gets it all wrong.
Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species.
In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time.
More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
No, it didn’t. The paper says nothing of the kind.
The paper is an analysis of DNA barcodes. DNA barcoding is a process that uses a short stretch of mitochondrial DNA to map an individual organism to a species — it’s a technique that lets you look at a sample of a few cells, amplify and sequence a single gene (COI or COX1 are commonly used in animals), and then unambiguously identify the specific species those cells came from. Being able to do this relies on an interesting property of a species: there is limited variance in the barcode sequence within the species, but there has to be greater variance of that sequence from other, even closely related species. In other words, DNA barcodes form tight little clusters of similarity that correlate well with other criteria for defining a species.
That raises questions. You can read the original article, Why should mitochondria define species?, for yourself and see. The question is about why variations within a species should cluster so tightly. Stoeckle and Thaler propose a couple of hypotheses to explain that phenomenon.
Either 1) COI barcode clusters represent species-specific adaptations, OR 2) extant populations have recently passed through diversity-reducing regimes whose consequences for sequence diversity are indistinguishable from clonal bottlenecks.
It’s a meaty paper that goes through the evidence for both of those hypotheses, and I’m wishing I’d seen this paper last semester, when I was teaching evolutionary biology — there is a lot of useful evolutionary thinking going on here. Maybe I can revoke all of my students’ degrees and tell them they have to come back for one last thing? I think we can go through the paper adequately in about a week, so I’m sure they won’t mind.
Their final conclusion, after analyzing millions of barcodes, is fairly straightforward, I think.
The simple hypothesis is that the same explanation offered for the sequence variation found among modern humans applies equally to the modern populations of essentially all other animal species. Namely that the extant population, no matter what its current size or similarity to fossils of any age, has expanded from mitochondrial uniformity within the past 200,000 years.
This is not saying that there was a single instant in the last 200,000 years from which all modern species arose simultaneously. It’s a statement about the process of speciation: species arise from isolation of a limited subset of an existing population, which is why they have limited variation in their DNA barcodes, followed by an expansion of the new species’ population, during which the DNA barcodes accumulate variation slowly.
No, they did not find out “that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago”. New species arise continuously, but they do so by going through a population bottleneck in geologically recent times. Homo sapiens arose as a distinct species between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, but that notorious London Underground mosquito may have evolved in the 18th century…which is still within the past 200,000 years, you may notice.
It’s a bit like reading a statement that almost all people are less than 100 years old, and then wondering, publicly and in print, about what happened in 1918 to cause every human being on Earth to have been suddenly born in that year. That must have been some orgy to celebrate the end of the Great War.
It’s not Brexit that is the harbinger of doom. It’s not the latest wave of immigrants that will overwhelm the previous wave of immigrants, the Normans, or the wave before that, the Angles and Saxons. It’s not the threat of loony dimwit Charles inheriting the throne.
It’s that The Guardian has published an heretical article questioning the bedrock of British sensibility.
Tea is shit. We don’t examine this enough in England. We just putter along, thinking tea is good; but it’s not good. It’s a lukewarm mug of leaf water, presented as a cure-all for life’s ills. “Nice cup of tea,” people say, when you’ve watched a vivid car accident or been given a terminal diagnosis, or gone for a walk and it’s started raining. Whether the mafia has kidnapped you and made you kill a man with a gun to win your freedom or if you’ve done quite badly in an exam, someone will say: “Let me get you a nice cup of tea.”
Whoa. I mean, it is only being published in one of those irrelevant radical northern newspapers, but still, those are dangerous ideas. Collapse is imminent. Chaos will run rampant. What does it even mean to be English anymore if this kind of rubbish is in the air?
Another cuppa is not going to help. Break out the brandy, everyone.
Al Vernacchio is a high school sex ed teacher. He takes the interesting approach of frankly discussing pornography in the classroom…not in a prudish, condemning way, either, but honestly discussing how it’s unrealistic and that real sex is not the predictable mechanical process that you’ll find in internet videos.
…studies have shown that kids are often first exposed to porn — some of it depicting violent or criminal behavior — in their early teens. And analysis has correlated pornography usage with sexual aggression, increased casual sex, and stronger gender-stereotypical sexual beliefs. When I ask Vernacchio what he thinks kids are taking away from porn, he doesn’t miss a beat.
“They learn that men are supposed to be sexually aggressive,” says Vernacchio, who’s known for his TED Talks on sex education and has become a go-to source for the New York Times. “They learn that women are objects. They learn that in the absence of consent, you don’t need a clear ‘yes.’ They learn that sex doesn’t require communication. They learn that you’re supposed to know what to do — like this knowledge gets preloaded into you, and if you don’t know, there’s something wrong with you.”
But that’s not what’s strange and exotic about this guy — he’s just speaking common sense (or what ought to be common sense). This is the bit that convinced me he’s living on an alien planet:
In 20 years at Friends’ Central, Vernacchio has become well known and highly regarded at the progressive, creative-minded private school. Laurie Novo, who’s worked at Friends’ Central (including as co-principal) for 25 years, says she’s never heard a single parent complain about Vernacchio’s classes. In fact, they’re so wildly popular — especially the 11th- and 12th-grade “Sexuality and Society” curriculum — that the school once had to hold a lottery for seats. Casey Cipriani, a 2001 graduate who took the course’s first iteration, says she recalls other students — and even her own mother — asking to read her homework.
Not a single complaint…unbelievable.
Meanwhile, here in Stevens County, Minnesota, United States of America, Planet Earth, our students once elected a gay man to be prom queen, and the community rose up in indignant outrage. Our theater department put on a children’s play that was all about tolerance and diversity, and most of the local schools boycotted it. I’m pretty sure if one of our high school teachers had a talk about the conventions of porn videos and mentioned a few porn sites (that the students already know about, but the parents like to pretend they’re ignorant), I’d be able to witness a lynching.
The Orlando Sentinel has an article on Christian homeschooling that had me banging my forehead on my desk. It’s a good article, but we’ve been saying this for decades: Abeka, Bob Jones University (BJU), and Accelerated Christian Education are fucking awful curricula. They are promoting Christian ignorance and lying to the kids, and this crap is getting subsidized by the state of Florida.
The social studies books downplay the horrors of slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans, they said. One book, in its brief section on the civil rights movement, said that “most black and white southerners had long lived together in harmony” and that “power-hungry individuals stirred up the people.”
The books are rife with religious and political opinions on topics such as abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act, which one labels a “radical social agenda.” They disparage religions other than Protestant Christianity and cultures other than those descended from white Europeans. Experts said that was particularly worrisome given that about 60 percent of scholarship students are black or Hispanic.
This is routine. What’s frustrating is that educators and scientists have been pointing out the deficiencies and dishonesty of these companies for years, and it feels like every year someone somewhere will gasp in dismay at the crap being taught, and wonder why no one has done anything about it. This is a different year, same old bullshit, and the state government just keeps on rubber stamping it through.
The Sentinel surveyed the 151 private schools newly approved by the education department to take scholarships for the 2017-18 school year. Seventy-five of the schools provided information about their curriculum either on their websites or when contacted by phone, and 30 of those, or about 40 percent, reported Abeka, BJU or ACE was a part of their academic offerings.
Only half were willing to disclose what they’re teaching? Makes you wonder what the silent, secretive half are doing.
Also, anybody qualifies as a teacher at these schools.
“Honestly, with our curriculum … a certified teacher is not required,” Natasha Griffin, district superintendent of Esther’s School, which has seven campuses in Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel last year.
At Esther’s School in Kissimmee, 11 of 18 teachers lacked college degrees last year, according to a document Griffin sent to the education department. For two of them, 11th grade was their highest educational level. Almost all of the school’s nearly 60 students are on state scholarships this year.
Would like to say that a responsible government would strip these schools of any subsidies and declare that they are no longer accredited in any way. But they won’t.
There’s be another article next year exposing the miserable teaching standards at Christian home schools. And there will be another the year after that. And the year after that. I ought to save them up and use them as kindling for my Viking funeral.
Don’t watch the video at the link unless you really like seeing dullards dully defending their bad curricula.
See you then!
Some of them exhibit extreme Christian kindness and charity.
“You don’t believe that gay people should be stoned to death, do you?” Skylar asked.
“I believe the Bible puts the death penalty on it,” Powell replied. “Obviously, not by me or anybody in a regular society, obviously. I believe it’s the government’s job to execute criminals. I believe that the Bible says clearly that homosexuality is a criminal crime. It’s a crime. It’s one of the worst crimes ever.”
“Is that what you’re advocating for?” Skylar pressed. “That our government should stone gays to death to execute them?”
Powell took the opportunity to state that he believes in humane executions when it comes to gay people.
“By whatever means they execute people. And obviously, I believe in humane, you know, putting to death,” Powell replied.
Yeah. In ‘Murica, we don’t stone gays to death.
But wait! After we dehumanize them enough to plan to murder them, what’s the point of this “humane” nonsense? Won’t that get in the way of efficiency? I don’t think Powell has thought this through.
How else can you interpret an article with the title, The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty. We are unique! We are spectacular! We are #1!
Unfortunately, we seem to be specializing in all the wrong things.
But by now, American cruelty is both legendary — and one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Just why would people in a rich country leave their neighbours to die for a lack of basic medicine, their young without good jobs or retirements, make their elderly work until their dying day, cripple students with lifelong debt, charge new mothers half of average income just to have a baby — not to mention shrug when their kids begin massacring each other at school? What motivates the kind of spectacular, unique, unimaginable, and gruesome cruelty that we see in America, which exists nowhere else in the world?
I can agree that the cruelty of our culture is obvious and manifested everywhere, but I hate to deflate our sense of exceptionalism, but we aren’t alone. Look at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how the United Kingdom and other European states are responding to immigration, how every human society reacts to the Other, how even a civilized nation like Germany could be stirred up by a demagogue to willingly commit atrocities, how Belgium afflicted criminal abuse on the people of the Congo. Our difference seems to be our willingness to perpetrate these torments on ourselves.
The author’s speculation about what causes us to be so horrible tends to fall flat, unfortunately.
My answer goes something like this. Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.
I disagree. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in this archetypical American society, and it’s not true that we “grew up in the shadow of endless war”, unless you take “shadow” literally. We didn’t experience war. Wars were something that happened elsewhere, to which we supplied cannon fodder. Wars were not something we suffered under, and while there was the ominous terror of nuclear war, we were also blithely confident that we’d win, no matter what. Wolverines! The American character was one of irrational optimism. The history we were taught was all about Manifest Destiny, the near-divinity of the Founding Fathers, our role as the Leaders of the Free World. We are always the winners, and the losers are always the worst people who fully deserved their fate.
The extreme capitalism part I agree with. To me, the best interpretation of the American spirit in literature is personified by Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch 22: irrepressibly cheerful, blind to the harm he does to others, willing to bomb his friends if it increases the value of his shares, and relentlessly sailing through a war that is nothing but a business opportunity to him. We are a people untouched by fear and unable to imagine the consequences.
The rest of the world has good reason to be terrified. Their only consolation ought to be that we’re probably going to wreck ourselves before we can exercise our full capacity for destruction on others.
Browse through the entries for Janelle Monae’s “I am a dirty computer” album. She lists her inspirations for each track, so it’s a peek into the mind of the artist. She’s definitely a big SF nerd, and also makes some fascinating juxtapositions of the influences that shaped her music.
Today I read an article that listed a few of the colossal errors of Jordan Peterson, and I was flattered to be cited by the author.
However, using the coincidence of serotonin as the supposed basis for behavioural parallels between lobsters and humans – trumpeted during the Channel 4 interview, again to give off the impression of scientific authority – has been expertly dismantled by the biologist PZ Myers. Evidently irked by Peterson’s intellectual overreaching, Myers claims that Peterson has “built a case on false facts and distortions of general observations from the scientific literature. He has not demonstrated anything about socio-cultural constructions. Not only does he get the evidence wrong, he can’t construct any kind of logical argument…”
Worse still, Myers argues, there is an ideological motive for all this: “Peterson is distorting the evidence to fit an agenda… It’s appalling the degree to which this man is asserting nonsense with such smug confidence. This man is lying to you.”
Oh, “expertly dismantled”…thank you, thank you, I wave to the audience and blush charmingly. I am gratified to be appreciated. But then…Google throws a bucket of ice-cold humility in my face and suggests that I go read this excellent article in the Washington Post by Bailey Steinworth.
Oh, man, it is so good. She points out that “in asking us to consider the lobster, he’s cherry-picking one model of social behavior when there’s a whole ocean full of equally relevant examples”, and then…she gives several examples. It’s beautiful.
As a psychologist, Peterson understandably seems to favor lobsters because of their well-characterized behavioral repertoire, citing among other things research on the neurotransmitter and antidepressant target serotonin. But they’re not the only inhabitant of the ocean that’s been studied in this way. He might also be interested in Aplysia. Like lobsters, sea hares of the genus Aplysia — sea slugs named for sensory structures that resemble rabbit ears — have been used extensively in serotonin studies. Behaviorally, however, lobsters and sea slugs could hardly be more different: While a lobster rarely wants to see another lobster, a sea hare placed on its own will crawl toward chemical cues indicating the presence of other sea hares. In fact, being with other members of its species improves a sea hare’s ability to learn and remember. Peterson’s opening chapter emphasizes that male lobsters compete for the best territory to win access to the most females. By contrast, in sea hare sex, everyone gets a turn. They’re hermaphrodites that mate in groups, alternating between the “male” and “female” roles.
Now that’s an expert dismantling. Go read the whole thing. Of of the dismaying truths of our woefully inadequately educated public, which includes a certain pretentious professor of psychology, is how unaware they may be of the diversity of biological strategies. Nature ain’t respectin’ your Biblical mores, people.
